A telephone network operator (“Carrier”) is a communications services provider that may have a fixed and/or wireless network infrastructure to provide communications services to its customers. A Carrier may utilize a combination of any number of technologies including those wireless technologies provided by any number of mobile network providers (such as cellular, LTE™) and those provided by any number of consumer establishments where Wi-Fi®, and the like, may be freely available to customers for Internet access.
A Carrier may use Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) which is a technology that provides voice communications services and data communications services (e.g., multimedia sessions) over Internet Protocol (IP) networks, such as the Internet and/or private packet networks. Typically, a software telephony application using VoIP which can be installed on various devices such as handheld devices with Android or iOS operating systems, and desktop or laptop computers with Windows or Linux operating systems, for example. Further, VoIP technologies have evolved to include a telephone number for users and which include Short Message Service (SMS) for text messaging services.
These software telephony applications may be installed on mobile devices as well as fixed (hard-wired desktop) computers. When these mobile devices are roaming in another country or another carrier's territory, typically different voice and data rates apply. Billing systems would then have to take into account these different rates in various roaming countries and territories, thereby increasing their complexity and further increasing the difficulty of communicating such rate differences to the users.